Emails With My Favorite Trump Supporter

By Peter Orner

Oct. 27, 2016

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CreditCreditKiersten Essenpreis

San Francisco — I have an old friend. If I need something, he’s the guy I call. A good father, a good husband. He’s got a Ph.D. and is a well-respected college professor. That I also believe he’s a racist, misogynist, homophobic lunatic, I’ll get to in a moment, because I first want to make very clear that I love him like a brother.

In high school my friend and I ran track together and because I was slow, he’d wait up for me, jogging in place at the top of each hill. And on those long runs we’d talk about philosophy and our own “puny existences.” That’s the sort of guys we were. Lucky to have each other because our teammates thought we were freaks.

Today we live far apart, and mostly communicate by email. Lately I spend much of life, when I should be working or paying attention to my daughter, sending my friend screeds. And when I’m not writing them on the screen, I’m writing them in my head. I am — and I’m not proud of this — completely obsessed with my friend’s position in this election.

My friend is an evangelical Christian and is, reluctantly, even now, supporting Donald J. Trump. He believes that Mr. Trump represents the lesser of two evils. He recently sent me an article from The Wall Street Journal arguing that Christians must do their duty and commit themselves to the difficult task of voting for Mr. Trump in the spirit of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, accused of having supported the bomb plot to kill Hitler, was executed by the Nazis. Because sometimes the greater good requires, etc., etc., etc.

My unhinged response read, in part: “Bonhoeffer’s courage is the same COURAGE as voting for Trump??? I expected more from you, a lot more. The only saving grace is that millions of Christians aren’t buying it. I’ll pray for you, my friend. And one day when you have to explain to your kids how you, as a Christian, but more important as a human being, could have supported this ticket, I’ll tell them that you truly believed you were helping save the country from a monster enabler of sexual predators and rapists of 12-year-olds — you had no choice. The all-white echo chamber where you received your information had so distorted your ability to see that you were temporarily blinded from reason.”

“I love how this election has turned you into a moralist,” he wrote. “You’re like an even more miniature Tim Kaine. My son (who was reading over my shoulder) asked me to tell you to ‘give Donald Trump credit for being a human being.’ Once again, instead of seriously engaging with the issues at hand, you sling out insults. It’s a very cogent article, one you are free to disagree with. But this isn’t engagement. You are not addressing the very legitimate concerns about Hillary. That is problematic. Happy birthday by the way.”

As furious as I get, deep down, I don’t actually doubt his sincerity when he tells me, mildly, always mildly, about Hillary Clinton’s “atrocities.”

Thinking about my friend makes me also think of my father. If my friend is the definition of a reluctant Trump supporter, my father, had he lived to enjoy this carnival, would have been the candidate’s poster child.

I have it on good authority (my mother) that my father wept for hours on the night Bobby Kennedy was killed in 1968. In the ’70s and early ’80s, he was an active member of the finance council of the Democratic National Committee. But by the ’90s he had come to embrace a shouting Fox News worldview of anti-immigrant and misogynist fervor, and he railed against what he called my hopeless political correctness.

The story of my father’s conversion is complicated, but if there was one event that led to his nursing his grievances, it is that in the early 1990s, he was sued for sexual harassment by one of his former employees. Though the case was settled out of court and my father was never in jeopardy of losing his law license, he stepped down from something called the Character and Fitness Committee of the Illinois State Bar Association. You might laugh at this, but it’s a real thing, and my father was especially proud of his service on this committee that measures a would-be lawyer’s moral fiber.

He felt misunderstood, maligned. Did he do it? He always said the allegations were patently untrue, but few people believed him.

By the time of the Obama administration, he had begun referring to the president with a Yiddish term I won’t repeat here (not, Dad, out of political correctness, but because it revolts me to this day and I can still hear you saying it in my ears). What he often had to say about women, especially my mother, who had left him, I won’t include here, either. But when I heard the Access Hollywood tape of Mr. Trump, I called my brother and asked him who the guy on the tape sounded like.

“You gotta ask?”

But he was my father; I loved him. When he died a few years ago, I happened to be staying with my old friend when I received the news. That weekend we ran together and talked. “Didn’t he teach you how to play chess?” my friend asked. “Who introduced you to Dickens?”

He helped me remember that, behind the anger, my father was still, and always, my father. I can’t expunge him from the record, my record. And to be honest it now brings me a warped kind of joy to think of what a kick he’d have gotten out of this last (ineffectual) roar of men of a certain age.

In 2014 my friend’s father died as well. We commiserated over email, about however much you think you’re ready for it, nothing prepares you for the void fathers leave behind.

In a bit I will send a message to my friend to say he’s a revolting Neanderthal, that I’m not kidding, that I believe he’s a danger to himself, his students, the Republic itself. I’ll also say hey to Diane and the boys. That new school working out?

How comforting our most deeply held political convictions are, in contrast to our love, which, though inexplicable, is somehow always — to use one my friend’s favorite words — merciful.

Peter Orner (@Peter_Orner) is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Am I Alone Here?”